


surprise, surprise

by maggierachael



Series: grade school games [3]
Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Cory Brooke, F/M, Fun with Synesthesia, Post-Season/Series 02, Pre-Season/Series 03, and a tiny miniscule amount of angst i guess?, at least not when cory is involved, i feel like i should so i'm gonna, i literally wrote this because i'm putting off writing something else for them, idiots to lovers, is a BRILLIANT idea, javi doesn't fully think his plans through, listen these idiots share one braincell and cory's got it most of the time, listen this is right before javi goes back to colombia for season three, should i start tagging this idiots to lovers?, so WE IN OUR FEELINGS Y'ALL, telling your best friend 'here put on a blindfold and get in the car', there we go, yes javi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:41:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23041912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggierachael/pseuds/maggierachael
Summary: He rolled his shoulders back, relaxing back into the driver’s seat he’d been sitting in for ten-aught years, and there it was - that stupid smile he did that he knew could get him whatever he wanted. Cory should’ve seen it coming, the way he was goading her on to trust him. It was a smile he’d used on every woman in Bogota, a smile that could get him into someone’s pants or out of a particularly sticky situation whenever the hell he wanted. It was a nice smile, and the bastard knew it.Cory knew it too, perhaps too well, and she swore she was going to get back at him for using it on her as she slung her beat-up work bag into the footwell and rolled her eyes.Javi's idea of a surprise is maybe, just maybe, a tad bit skewed.
Relationships: Javier Peña/Original Female Character(s)
Series: grade school games [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639453
Comments: 9
Kudos: 33





	1. what's your color?

**Author's Note:**

> "Everything is blue  
> His pills, his hands, his jeans  
> And now I'm covered in the colors pull apart at the seams  
> And it's blue..."
> 
> -Halsey, "Colors"

Cory liked surprises. 

She’d always gotten a kick out of them, really, regardless of what end of them she was on. She liked seeing people’s faces light up when she presented them with that thing they’d always wanted, or when they walked into a room they hadn’t expected to be full of people and things that they loved. And she equally loved not seeing things coming, seeing the satisfaction on people’s faces when her excitement bubbled up so much that her vision went pink. It made her happy, deep down in the pit of her stomach where few emotions ever truly reached. 

But when her best friend of twenty-five years handed her a sleep mask-turned-blindfold and told her to get in his car, she wasn’t sure if she liked where this particular surprise was headed. 

“You are a federal agent, Javier.” 

Her voice was dry against the heat of the Texan fall, yellow like the color of the cracking pavement she was standing on outside of her elementary school. The sun was baking against her back like she was a dozen of her grandmother’s sugar cookies, but still she didn’t climb into the open passenger seat of Javi’s truck, which had shown up outside her job with no warning as soon as the final school bell had rung. Instead, she raised an eye at him, her DEA best friend, who was looking at her like some kind of expectant puppy waiting to be taken for a car ride to the park. 

“I know what you people usually do with blindfolds, and it’s not exactly encouraging me to say yes.” 

She pointed at the sleep mask, a puffy pink thing currently sitting on Javier’s very grimy passenger seat like some kind of peace offering. It looked like a sad, pathetic stuffed animal, and she wondered for a moment where he’d even gotten the thing. The idea of hardened badass Javier Peña walking into the local CVS to buy a pink sleep mask was just about ridiculous enough to make her smirk. 

Javi’s expression matched her own, though his smile was significantly bigger as she glanced up at him, flanneled torso twisted toward her like a pretzel.

“Oh, ye of little faith, Brooke.” 

He sounded excited - maybe a little too excited, for somebody who had all but mastered how to manage the perfect deadpan. Cory’s eyebrow shot up like a pole vaulter.

“More like ye of “I know my best friend and he’s an idiot”, Peña.” 

She swayed on her feet, wanting badly to climb into the seat she’d been in hundreds of times before, but resisting on grounds of being stubborn. She wanted to clamber in, feel the worn brown leather against her back, but leave had done things to Javi. Weird things, and she didn’t know where this request landed on the universal sliding scale of strange. 

“I have lesson plans,” she said. “And about twenty-three buckets of paint to mix for sixty-five fifth graders. I don’t know if I have time for a joyride.”

“It’ll be worth it.”

Javi’s voice chased hers like a particularly sweet-tasting lime, and she startled. He sounded like one of her kids, so eager to hear a good response that he nearly cut her off in the process of responding. Was this how he was at work? Surely not, considering how much he resembled a teenager on a date as she leaned against his open car door, contemplating just what the hell was going on here. Him, showing up to her job, out of nowhere, asking her to come with him to show her something that she couldn’t drive to herself. 

Maybe leave was making him a little stir-crazy. 

“It’ll take thirty minutes,” he said. His voice was softer this time, less jump-the-gun eager. Closer to that cool, safe blue she’d always felt over the phone with him. “We can get takeout on the way home.” 

He rolled his shoulders back, relaxing back into the driver’s seat he’d been sitting in for ten-aught years, and there it was - that stupid smile he did that he knew could get him whatever he wanted. Cory should’ve seen it coming, the way he was goading her on to trust him. It was a smile he’d used on every woman in Bogota, a smile that could get him into someone’s pants or out of a particularly sticky situation whenever the hell he wanted. It was a nice smile, and the bastard knew it. 

Cory knew it too, perhaps too well, and she swore she was going to get back at him for using it on her as she slung her beat-up work bag into the footwell and rolled her eyes. 

It took her more than a moment to clamber into the seat she’d ridden in thousands of times before - she was short, and there was no getting around trying to climb into a busted old Chevy in a very flimsy skirt without a significant amount of effort. She probably looked like a fool to all the schmoozy WASPs picking up their kids in the minivan loop, but all she focused on was the warm heat of the seatbelt as she strapped it across her chest, and the only just-tampered excitement practically buzzing off her best friend as she settled in. 

“Alright, Peña.” 

She picked up the puffy pink mask and slipped it over her head, knowing it would leave her hair a mess but not caring as she settled it on her forehead. 

“Surprise me.” 

_______

Javi’s aging old pickup truck still drove as poorly as ever, as it turned out. 

Cory was used to it by now, but something about being blindfolded while riding in it made every little bump and shock to the tired chassis seem even more intense than usual. She’d been taking the poor girl out every month or so for several years to keep the battery in shape, not to mention all the years she’d spent riding in it as a twenty-something, but now she was keenly aware of every pothole in the road to their destination, and just how much Javi needed to get the damn thing’s shocks changed. 

She reminded herself to berate him for that as she adjusted the mask over her face for the millionth time, glad she’d forgone makeup that morning. As a synesthete, blindfolds were moderately claustrophobic for her. It wasn’t a thing she talked about a lot - or frankly, ever, since people had a hard habit of treating her like a fortune teller once they realized she could “see” sounds, and she rarely even thought about it anymore. (If she had to hear the words, “What does  _ my  _ voice look like?”, she was going to throw herself into oncoming traffic.) 

Javi knew, of course, as did her parents, and she was usually pretty good at fighting the swaths of colors and auras that filled her vision whenever her brain honed in on the landscape of sound around her. It lived in the back of her mind, only set free when she was painting or working with her kids - it was her superpower, and she’d learned to live with as an extension of who she was as a person. 

But when she was deprived of her sight, it was a whole other story. 

The sleep mask was comfy, at the very least, but where it prevented her from seeing where Javi was taking her, it opened a door in another part of her brain that she usually kept firmly locked. Her brain, deprived of anything else to do, laser-focused on the sounds around her: the rumble of the truck’s engine, the noise of its tires on the highway, even the sound of change rattling in the busted old cupholder. Every sound was an instrument, a piece of a symphony she hadn’t paid to see, nor did she want to. They were loud, ugly players, spoiled children let loose in her mind to cause havoc as she prayed for Javi to drive faster than the mind-numbingly slow pace Texans usually took. They were finger painting in her mind, spilling ugly colors all over the backs of her eyelids that made her nauseous just thinking about. 

“You alright, Cee?”

Javi’s voice cut through the ugly colors like paint thinner, a tenor voice above the orchestra. She couldn’t tell where they were - her sense of direction had never been great, even with her eyes - but he sounded focused, half-distracted by whatever was on the road as he talked to her. It sounded like the voice she’d heard over a shitty sat phone connection for all those years, the one that spoke to her while filling out paperwork or doing menial desk duties down in Bogota. It was familiar. She liked familiar. 

“Paint spill.” Her voice was not nearly as comforting. “In my brain.” 

She’d always referred to it that way, the times when her superpower got the best of her. They were rare, and hadn’t happened frequently since she was a kid, but Javi recognized her death grip on her work bag immediately. The sound of his quiet gasp was a very distinct red, a bright splash against an otherwise ugly canvas. 

“Shit, I--” He stammered out words, incomplete sentences that piled up like unrecyclable refuse. “The blindfold, I...I didn’t even think. Fuck.”

Javier Peña was not a man who panicked, but the words coming out of his mouth at the moment were about as close as he’d ever get to it. Worry changed the color of his voice - made it sharper, more vivid. Sharp was not exactly what Cory needed right now. 

“No, it’s okay,” she muttered quietly. Speaking made her nauseous. “Neither did I.”

Javi sighed. Another paintbrush splashed across the insides of her eyelids as the sound of the truck’s tires slowed. 

“Need me to pull over?” 

“No.” Her voice was tight. Clipped. “Don’t.” 

It was the exact wrong answer to give. Every nerve, every sense in her body knew that as surely as she knew what made the sky blue. But…

“You owe me a surprise, blockhead. I still want to see it.”

Hello, world. Meet Cory Brooke, stubborn as ever.

Javi sighed again. Now that she thought about it, now that she couldn’t pay attention to the dark circles under his eyes or the way that his hand always hovered near where a gun belt should be, Cory noticed it, over the din in her brain and around her: Javi sighed a  _ lot.  _

“Are you sure?” The worry was coloring his voice again, and her stomach twisted for a number of reasons as it did. “It’s not much of a surprise if it’s going to make you--” 

“I’m sure.” 

Cory hated to deny her best friend something he was clearly so excited about. Javi rarely got excited about anything - she wouldn’t call him a Grinch, but she wasn’t sure he was exactly enthusiastic about coming down from his mountain more than he absolutely had to. She blamed it on the years of service, all the long days of chasing ghosts in the night and coming home to nothing but more work stacked high on the table for the next day. Surely she could get over a little bit of nausea for him. 

“Talking might help.”

She had no idea if her statement was true or not, but anything was better than the overstimulating screech of tires on asphalt. She’d spent years on end talking to Javi without being able to see his face - surely this was no different. 

“What do you want to talk about?”

She could feel the car slowing still as he talked, and she had a feeling he was using his supposed superior government-honed instincts to tell whether or not she was going to hurl inside his car. (It wouldn’t be the first time, but Cory didn’t blame him for not wanting it to happen.) She wanted to yell at him, to tell him not to sacrifice what he’d clearly planned very carefully because her brain was having a conniption fit. She was practically thirty-five, for Christ’s sake, she could handle a little bit of car sickness and a headache. 

“Tell me a story,” she muttered. “Something stupid. Another Murphy story. Whatever you want. Just don’t make me think.” 

The words came out faster than she’d intended, unfinished parts shoved off the assembly line in an attempt to keep the machine from overheating. The stern tone she intended had gone out the window with any amount of sanity she’d had left when she agreed to Javi’s plan, but any words out of her mouth were words she could focus on instead of the hurricane in her head. Every nerve in her body was yelling to take the blindfold off, but she’d rather open the passenger door and fall into oncoming traffic than betray her best friend’s trust.

“No thinking.” She could hear Javi shift in his seat, feel the car pick up the tiniest bit of speed. “Got it.” 

She wasn’t exactly sure that he did get it, but her head was spinning enough that she didn’t fight it. She tried to settle in as best she could, waiting for the cogs in Javi’s brain to finish turning so they could spit out some kind of result. Neither of them had ever exactly been patient; it’s why they worked so well as friends. 

She was surprised, then, when he started muttering not in English, but in Spanish, a jumble of words tumbling out of his mouth that she couldn’t even begin to understand. (The most she knew was the basic please and thank you, and only from years of visiting Javi’s  _ abuelita  _ out of town.) They were words whose meaning was little to her, but massive to him, and that meaning was just about enough to stomp out the ugly canvas of colors surrounding her. They tore the canvas apart and replaced it with a new one, a kind of recycling that made her feel like her brain was being deep-cleaned like a carpet. 

The words were dark, a darker blue than his normal voice, like the waves of a massive ocean at sunset. Murphy’s name streaked green in on occasion, seaweed floating on the surface of his voice that carried her out to sea. (Javi’s best stories always involved him.) Out she floated, out past the rocks she’d been caught on, til the waves died out and she could just float on the current of his voice. The nausea ebbed as the tide went out, and eventually the orchestra in her head took a bow, cowing to Javi’s will as his story spilled out and out and out. 

One day, she’d make him teach her Spanish. For now, she just wanted to live in a world that only consisted of his voice. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Synesthesia is defined as a neurological condition in which in which one sense is simultaneously perceived as if by one or more additional senses such as sight. This can manifest in a number of different ways with a number of different stimuli, including sounds, colors, numbers, touch, or even sight. The type of synesthesia I've given Cory is projective chromesthesia, meaning that she sees actual colors in front of her face when she hears stimulating sounds, and certain sounds (like Javi's voice) always appear as the same color. (Some types of synesthesia are only associative, wherein people associate certain colors with things but don't actually see them.) This is a concept I've been fiddling with for a while in these stories, and it's been a fun challenge actually incorporating it into this piece without making her (or me) sound crazy. Hopefully I'll be able to work it in more in the future!
> 
> (and yes, the title of this chapter is named after that tiktok song, don't JUDGE ME)


	2. i wanna know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cory's surprise tips the scale in a few different directions.

“Javi, if you don’t take this blindfold off soon, I’m going to hurl all over this truck. Again.” 

Cory’s voice sounded tinny against the whir of an ancient air conditioner, still running on blast in the truck even though they were well into fall. It was a green sound, mossy on the dashboard and the armrests she was still clutching onto, even though Javi had shifted the truck into park. His voice had ceased, as had the loud whir of the truck’s engine, so the moss grew at a frightening pace, leaving room for only one thought in Cory’s head: 

They’d arrived at their destination. Wherever that was. 

She was sure they were in a completely different zipcode by now, but that might’ve just been her nerves dragging the car ride out. Javi had mumbled stories in Spanish the entire time, and she’d hyperfocused on how different his voice sounded when he spoke like that. He was still her Javi, but altered - a version she imagined was somewhere between the hotshot DEA agent who spoke in Spanish with his informants and the boy she’d met in junior high, who spent so much of his time with his kid, big-hearted  _ abuelita _ that he practically sounded like a miniature of her. It was a version of him she wasn’t used to, and she was fascinated enough that nothing else on the earth seemed to matter. Not even her own brain. 

“If you’re gonna do that, at least try to aim out the window.” 

His voice was back to normal now, back to the teasing, cerulean blue Cory was used to as he cut the engine altogether. The driver’s side door opened with a bright orange  _ pop! _ , and Cory waited in a sea of blackness for that voice to return. 

“If I could see where the window crank was,” she yelled out the open door, “I would!” 

If they hadn’t been covered, she would’ve rolled her eyes as she unbuckled her seatbelt and fumbled for the door handle. She knew the truck like the back of her hand, but it took more than a few tries before she finally felt it open from the outside, and she could tell Javi was standing there without having to see him. 

“Here.” A hand latched onto hers, holding her steady as she felt her way out of the car and onto the pavement. “Still need to vomit?” 

Cory frowned through her blindfold. 

“No,” she replied. “But I would like to see whatever it is you’re showing me, before somebody starts thinking you’re inducting me into a cult.” 

She waved the hand that wasn’t holding Javi’s in front of her face, at the mask he still hadn’t told her she could take off. She had no idea where they were, or how many people were around, and she didn’t exactly want one of her kids coming up to her the next day, wondering why their parents were talking about her wandering downtown Dallas blindfolded with a guy in a sketchy-looking truck. They already asked enough questions about Javi as it was. 

“It’d have to be one hell of a cult to persuade you to join.” Javi’s voice sounded smug, and Cory took a half-hearted swat at him for goading her on. “Not much farther though.” 

The hand still holding hers dragged her away from the car, and as the door shut with another traffic cone-orange  _ bang!,  _ she couldn’t help but feeling like she was back to being her sixteen-year-old reckless self. All she was missing, ironically, was a joint. 

The pressing heat of Texas soon left her behind, traded in for smooth air conditioning as Javi guided her up what she thought was a sidewalk into some kind of building. She had no idea what kind of building they were in, or why he’d brought her there - her only anchor to reality was the hand he was using to steer her away from any walls she might bump into. (Not that he was very good at it - she managed to run into the handrail on the steps up to the door.) The paint spill in her mind had been mopped up, but the utter blackness it had left behind wasn’t much more comforting, and she put all of her trust in that hand as it pulled her along, into a whirring box of an elevator that splattered deep purple across her eyelids. 

It wasn’t the worst of the colors that had been thrown at her that day, but she couldn’t help squeezing Javi’s hand just the tiniest bit as the elevator shifted under her feet. How many floors were they going up? Were there other people with them? Was he just fucking with her? All those questions spun through her head as they traveled upwards, cut off only by Javi’s voice urging her forward once the tiny, metallic  _ ding _ of the elevator released them to their destination. 

“Over here.”

The echo of their feet on what she assumed was bare concrete was cold, an icy primer on the brand new canvas her brain had summoned once she’d exited the car. Her nerves had been dulled by Javi’s stories, hot blood in her veins replaced with cooling ocean water, but the excitement of whatever it was he was about to reveal stirred it into a tsunami bubbling just under the surface of her skin. She didn’t usually paint with watercolors, even in her brain, but he always seemed to be the exception to the rule. 

She could hear the jingle of keys as they emerged from Javi’s coat pocket as they slowed to a stop, little gold bells that reminded her vaguely of the fairies one of her third graders had drawn that week. It almost felt like she was entering some kind of fantasy world, the door Javi guided her through her own wardrobe to Narnia. She’d gone so long without seeing him that every day they were together felt like some odd kind of story, a universe she’d built in her head of her ideal life, one where he hadn’t spent years risking his life for the sake of their country. Not to mention the energy that was still radiating off him in spades - the whole situation felt so foreign that she half-expected to see a faun or a talking beaver when Javi finally gave her clearance to pull the blindfold from her head. 

“Hope this won’t make you as nauseous as the car ride,” he said. Cory could feel his hand pressing on the small of her back, tense where he’d guided her inside as she lifted a hand to her face. 

“It’d better not.”

She smirked as she pulled the blindfold from her eyes, lids reflexively shutting against the brightness in the room. (Or was it to make the surprise even more exciting? She wasn’t sure.) Javi’s hand flexed, then pulled away from her back, and she felt almost saddened by it as she blinked against the light to finally see what her best friend had promised her. 

It was an empty room. 

It took her brain a brief moment to adjust - mostly to the light pouring in from outside - but really, she wasn’t sure what else she should’ve expected. She was allergic to cats and dogs, and Javi had all the grace of a monster truck when it came to those kinds of things. He wouldn’t have had to drive her anywhere if it had been something small, and by the looks of it, the room was something more than just empty. 

It was large, a spacious area perhaps more suited for a museum than anything else. Cory could’ve chucked a football as hard as she could and it still would’ve only made it halfway across. The ceilings were vaulted to twice her height, and she shivered at the lack of heating in the massive space. It looked like somebody’s basement, only with floor to ceiling windows and a view out onto the whole of Dallas, supplemented by what Cory was sure was a balcony at the far end of the room. The grey walls were flecked with streaks of paint, a complement to the track marks and signs of wear tinging the wood-paneled floor. She could feel it through her sandals, the years of use and abuse, of the love somebody had clearly given this room over a period of time she couldn’t even imagine. That was a benefit to synesthesia — her senses were hyperconnected, able to feel out things other people could barely skim the surface of. She could tell when a thing had been loved. It was in her bones. 

It was the same ability Javi had called weird for as a kid, her uncanny tact for telling when he’d been to his  _ abuelita’ _ s or when his dad had called. Loved things softened, their edges blurred until the sharpness was all the way gone. They drew people to them, enticing them with the promise that they would love you as much as they had been loved themselves. It was true for people, and it was true for things. Being loved made one as beautiful as any of the colors Cory’s brain produced for her. 

And this place was stunning. 

She almost didn’t want to move, afraid of disturbing the feeling she’d walked into as she crossed the threshold. It wasn’t until she spotted the room’s sole piece of furniture that she sussed out just why Javi had brought her there, and only that could propel her feet forward into the room. A drafting table as big as her entire classroom was tucked into one corner, in front of windows big enough to see all the way to Austin. It looked old and sturdy, like the ones she’d always ogled while antique shopping but could never afford, its dark wood stained to protect against paint and varnish and charcoal. It didn’t have anything on it, but it didn’t have to. It was beautiful enough as it was, and it told her everything she needed to know. 

Javi had rented her a painter’s studio.

Her vision went blue and soft, but not from her synesthesia. She’d told Javi when they were young that she wanted to be a painter, someone like Frida Kahlo or Georgia O’Keefe, that she’d move to Europe to paint fascinating sunsets and cavort with the kinds of people Javi would probably arrest now on suspicion of possessing illicit substances. It was a dream she’d shared with only the most important of people, her descriptions of her dream studio colored by the way she saw the world - through rose-tinted glasses, yes, but also through blue ones, and yellow ones, and bright, shining green ones. It was the dream she held in her heart of hearts, way down below everything else. 

It wasn’t a dream she’d been able to follow through on, of course. Not like Javi’s dream to work in law enforcement - of the two of them, he was certainly the more motivated one. She, on the other hand, hadn’t really, seriously painted in years - not since Javi had left for Bogotá and she’d switched school districts. It was always something she lived with, filling the pages of her classroom notes, but never acted on. A dream that got stopped by one too many bad days, one too many fears that she’d come crawling back home with nothing but failure tainting her memories. She’d gone the safe route, gotten her teaching certification and settled in until she could “find the time” to pursue art beyond finger painting. But being a teacher - even an art teacher - didn’t afford her much time to transfer all the colors she saw to paper, and even if it did...

“You always say your apartment isn’t big enough to properly paint anything.” 

Javi’s voice spooked her a bit out of her revelry, little blue dots filling the corners of her vision like paint splatter. 

“Thought you could use a bigger space.”

Cory glanced over at her friend. It looked like he was sweating, despite the chill of the room, and he was shifting on his weight like he was slow dancing with a ghost. He was doing that thing with his hand that she could tell meant he desperately wanted to reach for a cigarette but couldn’t, and now it was left with nothing to do. This was the opposite of the stupidly confident man who’d rolled up in the elementary school parking lot, smiling at her like he knew he’d get his way. His jaw was clenched within an inch of his life, and he looked...nervous. 

“Bigger space?” She raised an eyebrow at him, only just holding off from taking his fidgeting hand in order to keep her emotions in check. “Javi, this is a fucking cavern.” 

She gestured with one arm, and her friend shrugged. His voice came out sounding much more confident than he looked. 

“And now you won’t have to store that gigantic flower painting in your guest room anymore.” 

Cory frowned.

“I’m serious,” she muttered. “Is this…?”

" Paid for. Two years’ rent.” His shoulders relaxed a bit, and she thought she heard him bite back a sigh. “We’re only about twenty minutes from your place. I’ve got time on Saturday before I leave, I’ll get Dad to help move your stuff in so you don’t have to.” 

He toyed with the keys in his hand again, the little golden fairy bells jingling again as he chucked them over to Cory. She caught them soundly in her fist, cradling the little piece of magic that unlocked her own private world to her chest. 

“Big one opens the door, little one unlocks the supply closet, and the pink one lets you onto the balcony.” He smiled at her, an expression much less sure than the one he’d flashed when he’d picked her up. “Think of it as a ‘sorry I have to go back to Colombia’ present.”

“If you were really sorry, you’d take me with you.”

She tried to make it sound like a joke, but she was a pitiful comedian. The words left her mouth faster than she could consider their impact, and she’d perhaps never regretted a bad joke more. He’d just presented her with something she’d been dreaming of since she was twelve, and here she was, firing back at him like she was still that old. She’d spoken without thinking, even as her chest felt full with gratitude for the one person who’d paid attention to her errant daydreaming for nigh on twenty-five years. 

But she couldn’t deny that it had hurt when he’d told her he was leaving again. Leaving for another assignment, to track down another group of men made of pure evil, reporting to a group of men who were no less vile, only for different reasons. Leaving for another unset amount of time, leaving whatever future it was that she’d imagined them having years ago in art school hanging out to dry once again. It was a childish hope, that future, and the news that it would again be postponed hurt like nothing else. Like a bullet straight to the chest. 

It was an odd kind of hurt, that feeling. It was bitter, angry, jealous — upset with the world for tearing away the one person who deserved a rest, who deserved time that wasn’t spent busting his ass for people who didn’t give a shit about him. It was righteous anger, and perhaps misplaced at that. (Who was she to dictate what to be angry about, a woman who’d run away from her real dream because the possibility of the big, open world scared her half to death?) 

But it was also something else. A deep, jagged feeling, a sharp piece of glass cut into a type of longing that she couldn’t find a proper place for in her chest. A feeling that was no longer just sadness at the physical distance between friends, but something else. Something she hadn’t quite figured out how to cope with. Something that she promised herself she’d never give name to. 

Not in front of him, at least. 

So, she shoved it down. Boxed it up. Locked it up with a key she chucked into the Rio Grande. Maybe one day that key would turn up, floating in the Gulf like a child’s lost message in a bottle. Maybe someone would find it, sell it, turn a profit for it. Bag and tag it for evidence. Maybe it’d even end up with all those people he tried so hard to stop. Surely the key to somebody’s soul was worth as much as a couple kilos of cocaine. 

Either way, the feeling was protected. The glass shards of the magic mirror swept up and stowed away. Protected from view, like a sickly animal in a special cage. 

She’d never exactly learned to cope. But Javi didn’t need to know that.

“How’d you even afford this?”

She moved towards the drawing table, too overwhelmed to stay in one place any longer. She covered up her previous statement with a smile, her hand ghosting over the worn antique wood as she looked back at Javi. His smile was wavering even more now, but if she’d upset him, he didn’t say anything. He simply tracked over to where she was standing, mirroring her movement on the table with the opposite hand. 

“DEA gave me some kind of fuck-off stipend as a reward for being on the Escobar team,” he said. “Didn’t have anything better to do with it.” 

He looked sad in the sunlight from the window, Cory decided. Tired. And he’d chosen to spend the money he’d been given for the efforts that had made him that way on her. For no particular reason other than his own selflessness. She thought she could feel her heart crack in two inside her chest just thinking about it. 

“Could’ve replaced that piece of shit truck downstairs,” she joked, smile still plastered over her real emotions like duct tape. Javi shrugged. 

“Could’ve replaced your piece of shit Jeep, too.” 

He bumped her shoulder with his own, and Cory was moderately shocked that this was the direction their afternoon had taken. So much floated under the surface of their conversation, so many strange things remaining unsaid like sharks hiding in the unseen depths of an ocean. She figured that, if they were to continue, she and Javi were going to need a bigger boat. 

“You put up with my shit for four years,” he said, his voice quiet in her ear. “Thought you deserved a thank you present.” 

Cory laughed. She’d put up with Javi’s shit for longer than that, and she didn’t plan to stop any time soon. 

“And now I can put up with it in a nice studio downtown.”

“Exactly.” 

The shoulder that had bumped her moved to wrap an arm around her, tearing her attention away from the gorgeous drafting table as Javi pulled her into a hug that, she thought, he probably needed much more than she did. His arms snaked around her midsection, and she mirrored the motion in earnest, resting her cheek on the fabric of his jacket. Hugs weren’t a thing adults did nearly enough, Cory thought. Especially she and Javi. 

For the first time in a while, here in her arms was another loved thing she knew, as well, perhaps, as her own mind. A man whose hands she’d put her own life into, trusted like he was simply another extension of herself. He had his softness, tucked away behind an exterior built to protect it, but there nonetheless. She knew where to look for it — in his eyes when he talked to his dad, or the way he laughed when he was maybe a little bit too drunk for his own good. It wasn’t obvious, but it was there, and she’d helped foster it. 

But the sharp edges were coming back too. The years of tireless work and thankless nights were a whetstone for them to be sharpened upon, hardening some of the soft bits out until she had to search for weeks to find them. No amount of phone calls could soften those edges out, counteract what the world was throwing at him in a determined bit to beat him down. The sharp edges poked at Cory’s heart every time she saw him, the tip of a blade he wasn’t even aware he was holding. She wanted nothing more than to smooth them out, work away at them even if it was a fruitless job. 

But she didn’t have the time for that, so she supposed a hug was good enough for now. 

" I expect you to have an exhibition by the next time I’m back.” 

He murmured the words into her hair, and she could feel his voice buzzing in her bones all the way down to her feet. It calmed the tsunami in her bloodstream, if only to heat the water into a jacuzzi as she leaned back to look at him. 

“That a bet, Peña?” 

“If you want.” 

She caught his eye and that smile was back - the dumb, suave DEA agent smile, and for once she was happy to see it. For once, it looked open, and actually, genuinely happy. Genuine was a hard thing to come as nearly forty-year-old adults went, but Cory knew it when she saw it. 

She gave him her own smug smile in return, a release valve for the emotions building up under her skin like steam. She didn’t have any other way to express those emotions, those strangely shaped pieces of Tupperware that didn’t fit into her cupboard with the rest of the dishes They were ugly, and mismatched, and she was fairly sure a few of them were missing their lids, but she let them out anyway. Javi had seen the insides of her messy cabinets enough times before. 

“Fine,” she said. “You come back in one piece, and I’ll get myself an art dealer.” 

It was a hefty thing to ask. She barely knew if Javi  _ would _ come back (god forbid), and she hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in over a year. But somewhere, deep down in her chest, a small sliver of hope lived. It was small, tucked into the same space where her childhood dreams still lived, but it was there, and it told her that she was almost certain that what she said would come to pass. 

And on that knowledge alone, she was able to relax enough to sock him on the arm, just for old time’s sake. 

“You still owe me takeout though.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOO BOY WE'RE IN IT NOW Y'ALL. 
> 
> Did I intend to write a slowburn? No. Am I enjoying it now that it's happening though? Absolutely. Y'all's comments yelling at these two to get their shit together make my whole damn day. Javi can handle a whole ass international drug crisis and Cory manages sixty-five hyper children every day, and yet the two of them are blind FOOLS when it comes to each other. We love pining.


End file.
